The enemy attacks from all sides

The writer is an analyst and
commentator.

In the Islamic tradition, Muslims are warned that they will be attacked by Satan, holistically, relentlessly, shamelessly, over and over and over again. Satan will attack the believer from the front and the back, the left, and the right, from above and below, from all sides.

When we try to deal with and process the impact of terrorist attacks in Pakistan, we should try to keep in mind the relentlessness of Shaitaan. There is nothing random, or mindless about the targets that violent extremist non state actors choose in Pakistan. Each target is chosen to inflict the maximum pain upon Pakistan. Each target seeks to wreak havoc from the front and back, the left and right, above and below, and all sides.

The terrorist attack on the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda on January 20 felt like déjà vu for a reason. It wasn’t just mimicking the APS attack in Peshawar of December 16, 2014. It was also mimicking the Nadra office attack in Mardan of December 29, 2015. It was also mimicking the polio centre attack in Quetta of January 13, 2016. It was also mimicking the khasadar checkpost attack in Peshawar, near Jamrud of January 19, 2016.

Pattern-watchers will find what they seek.

Pakhtuns should be forgiven for seeing all of these attacks as instances in which the primary victims of our collective incapacity to prevent them are Pakhtuns. Others may be forgiven for pointing out that the planners, facilitators and perpetrators of these attacks also happen to be overwhelmingly Pakhtun. And thus begins a debate about Pakhtun identity.

If you are big on state capacity, you will note the state as the primary target. Many will scoff at the notion that the police, or polio centres, or Nadra, or universities in Pakistan actually work. Yet they do, for the most part, most every day, across the country. Of course, there are lots of examples of failure and of corruption and of servile incompetence. We can and should have an insatiable appetite to find weaknesses in the way in which the state does things in Pakistan, but this is a country that still works surprisingly well, given the scale and ferocity of the insurgencies and enmities it has survived, and the quantum of incompetence and corruption that society has hypocritically internalised within it.

When terrorists hit a police checkpost, they are not just killing cops. They are eating away at our collective will to stand at our posts and do our jobs (this appropriation of police bravery is not with malign intent, as I hope to illuminate shortly). By killing policemen, who have been possibly the single most consistent targets of terrorism in Pakistan, the terrorists are telling us what scares them: brave cops. They are also telling us where they think we are vulnerable: our narrative about cops.

The terrorists know that most Pakistanis are suspicious and contemptuous about policemen because most Pakistanis only see the parts of the police that deserve our suspicion and contempt. But like everything in life, we tend to see only the outliers. The rank and file of any element of the civil service is essentially a microcosm of society at large – lots of petty thieves and sycophants, but many more honest, decent human beings trying to do a decent job so that they can sleep well at night, and go about their business with their heads held high. We will never see those cops in our real or virtual timelines. Except that we do. And we miss them altogether.

Those funerals? You know, the ones of the cops that get blown up, shot at, and killed by terrorists? Yes. Those ones. Those are the silent majority. Those aren’t the bad guys. Those are the men and women that stand at their posts while a proverbial hail of shrapnel and bullets is sprayed at them. Those are the ones that are everyday Pakistan. They too are Pakhtun (and Punjabi, and Sindhi, and Baloch, and Mohajir). They are us. When the terrorists kill them, they are trying to kill the will of Pakistan to stand and defend the space and the grounds that are wholly and completely Pakistani – the Pakistani state and society.

When they hit a Nadra office, there are all sorts of victims on the site of the blast, from all walks of life. But the larger target is the concept of going and getting an ID card. The larger target is the concept of places like Mardan, and Jacobabad and Mastung and Kohistan being part of something bigger. What strings these places together? What else but the sinews of federalism? And symbols of a state superstructure that can, while failing at so much else, put together a world-class organisation like Nadra. A place where an MIT-trained software specialist can work with Harvard-trained problem solvers. In Pakistan.

When they attack a polio worker, the victims are the workers themselves, and the children that are being denied a vaccine that no child in the world is denied any longer, save Afghanistan and Pakistan. The victim is also the international credibility of Pakistan; “hmmph! A country that can’t control polio, and can’t protect its children from terrorists? Guffaw!”

At the Bacha Khan University, the victims were not just those that were killed on the day, or those that suffered injuries. The victims are also the students who would have learnt from Assistant Professor Hamid Hussain about covalent bonds, or tetrahedral carbon, or a free radical and how these impact methane and ethane. The victims are the banks, and telecom companies that would have hired those young students upon graduation. The victims are the brothers and sisters of those students who were the first in their families to break through the inertia of being from a small village in a small district in a part of the country without a McDonalds. The siblings that were inspired, and were going to need help getting past ‘Go!’.

The existence of policemen, of Nadra offices, of polio centres and of universities named after political leaders is anathema to terrorists. They all stand as testaments to the will of Pakistanis and the weakness of terrorists.

When the terrorists kill innocent citizens, they aren’t just taking away life from individuals. They are taking away individuals from families. They are robbing families from their communities. They are exacting isolation upon communities from the rest of society.

Each shard of shrapnel and each bullet that has been sprinkled across Pakistan by the TTP is an act of war against not just one aspect of Pakistan, but against all of it.

To fight this war effectively, Pakistan must fight the kinetic wars, in which we kill and apprehend bad guys. But to fight the war effectively, we have to acknowledge that the bad guys are not just coming at us from the front, or from the right. They are coming at us from the back too, and from the left, and from above and below, and from everywhere and anywhere.

Saying that there have been fewer attacks since APS may be accurate, but is incredibly self-defeating. To those who are still mourning their loved ones, our search for positives in tragedy will seem like we are rummaging through the corpses of dead children, trying to find success in the utter failure of their deaths. Since we already know that the enemy is coming not just from the front, but from all sides, we must also prepare to speak in a manner than reflects our preparation for this war.

Allowing self-congratulatory and conspiratorial arrogance to try to shape the mainstream discourse in the aftermath of tragedy is what countries that are losing a war do. Pakistan will not lose this war on the battlefield front. But the enemy is not attacking Pakistan from the front alone. The enemy is attacking from all sides.

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